If you mention the words Ted and Martin in relation to Formula 1 these days, most people will think about the Sky TV presenters Ted Kravitz and Martin Brundle.
Back in the 1970s, Ted Martin meant a Formula 1 V8 engine.
Edward C Martin was an RAF pilot during World War II and then became involved in the design of model engines with the Anchor Motor Company in Chester in the late 1940s. In 1952 he moved to Canada to work with GM and worked there for the next 17 years, although he also established a UK company called Alexander Engineering to tune Formula Junior engines. He then developed his own four cylinder 1500cc Martin FJ engine and when F1 changed to the 3-litre formula in 1966,it seemed logical to combine two of these to create a three-litre V8. The first such engines were run in a modified Lotus 35 chassis, prepared by John Pearce, a wheel manufacturer, who ran a garage specialising in racing conversions, in the west London suburb of Southall.
Pearce had started out as a welder at Peerless Cars Ltd in Slough, a small sports car company which duly went bust in the late 1950s. It was revived making a car called the Warwick, but this too went out of business and so Pearce moved on to the Cooper Car Company in Surbiton and then joined Chris Lawrence’s LawrenceTune in Acton. At the same time Pearce operated a spares business using an old double-decker bus, which was parked on old railway land in Staines. When he had sufficient money, in 1962, he bought the garage at 10-12 Western Road, Southall and began manufacturing magnesium alloy wheels, which were sold under the JAP Magna brand.
The Pearce-run Lotus-Martin was raced at the start of 1966 by Roy Pike and finished third in a race at Mallory Park, but the following year it proved to be very slow in practice for the Race of Champions, despite being driven by Piers Courage. He later crashed the car in testing at Snetterton and the project was abandoned.
That season Pearce ran a Cooper-Ferrari for Chris Lawrence and he raced this to fifth in the Gold Cup at Oulton Park.
Martin commuted backwards and forwards between the UK and Canada, so development work on his V8 was slow, but Pearce pushed ahead with his own chassis, while the Cooper-Ferrari was raced again in the British and German GPs. The Pearce-Martin proper appeared in January 1967, at the Racing Car Show at Olympia. The first of the cars was tested at Brands Hatch but was destroyed by Lawrence, who was pushing hard to try to beat a time set by Tony Lanfranchi in the Cooper-Ferrari.
The team built another chassis and was scheduled to make its debut at the International Trophy at Silverstone at the end of April, with two Pearce-Martins entered for American Earl Jones and Lanfranchi, with Robin Darlington entered in the Cooper-Ferrari. On the night before practice began the team’s transporter caught fire and everything was destroyed.
Pearce and Martin went their separate ways after that with Pearce’s business shutting down in 1973, also apparently after a fire. Pearce turned to farming and settled near Maidenhead.
Martin designed engines for various projects, including the Monica sports car in 1973 before returning to his first love, model engineering in his retirement.
Dreams don’t always come true.
joeblogsf1 
These are such wonderful little stories…
Plus, you are able to be matter-of-fact in how you tell it, but somehow arrange the reportage to paint an emotion-laden picture… it’s the damnedest thing (in the best of ways)…
Wasn´t the engine in the Monica adapted from the racing engine? A friend had a Monica as a project (sold on as a project too!) and the Martin engine was very compact.
JAP wheels were good-looking and well-priced, so popular but porous, a staple of the CCC generation. Think they may be re-manufactured now. Seems all a bit amateurish and foolish in retrospect, but fun!
Pearce and Warwick eh?.Time to get out the Observers Book Of Cars,bought with pocket money in the late ’50’s. Saw a Warwick once and it had the most rippled finished body I have ever seen. Keep them coming Joe!
Joe, where do you get all this stuff?
🙂
LOL
I guess that’s why Ted Kravitz calls Joe “Paddock Sage” (as heard on one of Ted’s notebooks)
It comes with old age.
Crikey! I remember reading about the Monica-Martin in the motoring press. It looked very much like a Lotus Elan +2 from the front. In fact, at first, I thought someone had put a V8 into a Lotus and added a fastback when I first saw the pictures.
there is a typo Pearce, becomes Pearse in the last paragraph or so 😦
There was just one Pearse and it is not there any longer…
We ran one of Ted’s four cylinder engines bored and stroked to 1840cc size in a space framed Morgan 4/4 in the mod sports championship in the late 60’s. It was an excellent engine and produced 165 HP on the dyno plus was very torquey and drivable. We had bought it from that genial rogue, John Pearce. He was also selling race car trailers at what seemed very reasonable prices, at which we were naive enough to bite. The problem was that the single wheel suspension each side of the trailer, were the swing axles from scrapped AC invalid carriages (Invacar). The stub axles were not designed for anything like the load of the trailer plus whatever was on top and kept shearing off. Before we rebuilt the trailer with Indespension rubber sprung units, we used to carry a complete spare Invacar swing axle unit with us, bolted onto the front of the trailer.
Always remember James Hunt commentary.
Brilliant informative and always a comical put down when Murray Walker got carried away in…”Sorry Murray but that’s incorrect & what a ridiculous statement are you suffering from something 😄”.
Always thought DC and Brundle made the best team. Then on ITV it was James Allen and Blundell.
When it got back on the BBC from ITV it was another BBC presenter who’s name escapes me. He did the voice overs on the early F1 racing games.
Simon Taylor?
Another very interesting story Joe, thanks do much for sharing the information. I always find it interesting to hear people’s backgrounds that I knew nothing about. (I too remember the J A Pearce Magna wheels from my youth, but didn’t realise that he had such pedigree with Warwick & Cooper).
I also seem to remember someone racing an Escort Saloon in the 70’s with a Martin V8 in it…
Yes I remember that Escort in the Paddock at Thruxton, looking under the bonnet and being very impressed at the small size. Got a pic somewhere…
Funny you should mention that, but i recall a V8 Escort in the mid 1970’s?, with a Martin engine, and i read something about it in AS or MN around then. Wondered whatever happened to it?
Hello Joe, thanks again for all these stories. I’d like to remember that yesterday Mario Poltronieri – F1 tv presenter for the Italian national TV service RAI – died at the age of 87. His voice accompanied all f1 grand prix on Italian TV from the early 60s to late 90s. . Not my favourite journalist but a very sympathetic person and anyway an important sports journalist on the Italian scene
Yes, I did hear that news. He will be mentioned in an upcoming FFF, as it happens…
The Pearce Cooper-Ferrari was surprisingly well turned-out for a ‘Special.’ Ultimately, though, Jack Pearce’s venture into F1 did not end well. In April 1967, as Joe explains above, he had ambitiously entered no fewer than three ‘bitsa’ F1 cars for the International Trophy Race at Silverstone. The truck into which they had been jammed, together with all the team’s equipment, was parked away from the paddock, on the Club circuit, when it inexplicably caught fire. Everything was destroyed, which is said to have resulted in an interesting insurance claim.
Chris Lawrence was certainly a brave chap, who in 1966 had ventured to compete in two GPs (GB and Germany) at the wheel of the Pearce Cooper-Ferrari. I well remember him doing his best in that year’s late-season non-championship F1 Oulton Park Gold Cup, where I was flag-marshalling at Lodge corner. However, the main excitement was at the front, with two BRM H-16s contesting the race with the 3-litre Brabham-Repcos of Jack Brabham and Denny Hulme, with intervention from Jim Clark’s works 2-litre Lotus-Climax 33 (his own H-16 had not survived qualifying).
That race was probably the zenith of the ridiculously complex H-16s, both of which led the race at various times in the hands of Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill, sounding magnificent until the inevitable gremlins set in. The Brabhams of Jack and Denny virtually dead-heated in first and second places, while Chris Lawrence came home two laps adrift in fifth place.
It was Chris Lawrence, a long-time Morgan fan, who persuaded Charles Morgan to build that rather peculiar ‘streamlined’ BMW-powered Morgan Aero 8, which actually got to the finish at Le Mans in 2004. Chris died in 2011.
I met Chris Lawrence and his good lady a few times later in his life and found them both charming and very willing to share some great anecdotes. I was very sad when he passed away.
Having owned Triumph TRs since 1962 I was well aware of Chris Lawrence’s work tuning this engine, but I didn’t know, or have forgotten his F1 links.
Wonderful obscure FFFs Joe.
Thank you for keeping us all going through a long winter which has been so difficult for you and your family.
Bloody Good Show.
Ted was a friend of my Dad and I remember visiting his workshop which was next door to Fred Hylier’s who prepared the Alexander minis in Haddenham,Bucks. Ted had a wonderful train set which went round his garden in Thame. He could ride on it. Thanks for his history Joe.
I raced ut of Alexander Engineering in 1960 and 1962. The firm was owned by ex hillclimber Michael Christie. Fred Hylier was his ship foreman in those years. Ted Martin had his workshop along round the back and I recall speaking with him about the V8. I drove past the site a couple of years ago, but nothing remains. I always thought of those poor lads grinding out the ports in cylinder heads without much breathing protection.
Something of a surprise ending. Just at the point where most of the FFFs lead into a connection with some better known name or event in the F1 sphere, we are faced with the harsh yet accurate reality that “dreams don’t always come true”. It’s easy for distant observers to forget how many tryers fall by the wayside to give us the elite we enjoy every other Sunday or so, without leaving their mark in a prominent place. Reading their stories is some small way of acknowledging the rôles they played in making the sport what it is. Thanks, Joe, for giving us the chance to become acquainted with them.
Yes, another great piece of history!
My memory is a little hazy of the JA Pearce F1 car, but I seem to recall he appealed to the fans for cash to help get the F1 car to the races – a sort of early version of crowdfunding. lots of them donated their hard earned cash and then mysteriously the transporter caught fire and all was lost.
We never did hear what happened to the fans money they put into the venture!
Ted Martin! Well I never.. My father took me to the Garden and Woodland Railway near Thame and we spent the whole afternoon talking trains with him. I had no idea we shared also a love of mototrsports
Formula Junior was 1100cc, and the first Martin V8 was based on two of those for 2 litres and appeared at the Racing Car Show at the beginning of 1966; some were used in US sports racing.
When the first 3 litre engine was finished, Ted Martin needed a chassis to test it in, and Charles Lucas were using Alexander Eng.’s dyno next door; so a deal was done to fit it in a spare Lotus 35 which Piers Courage had crashed slightly in the Argentinian Temporada F3 series at the beginning of the year.
This Lucas-entered car is what Roy Pike drove on Boxing Day 1966 at Mallory Park; Piers Courage’s qualifying time for the Race of Champions at Brands was the same as Denny Hulme’s in the Brabham-Repco and quicker than the 2-litre and F2 cars making up the field.
After Piers’ testing crash at Snetterton, Lucas concentrated on F3 and Ted took his engine back.
The Monica project started by Jean Testevin (who made his money supplying railway wagons to SNCF) required a 2.8-litre engine for tax reasons; Testevin originally contacted Chris Lawrence about Lawrencetune Triumph engines but Chris put him on to Ted Martin. Only the prototypes had the Martin engine (and were styled by Lawrence) because Rolls-Royce who were contracted to build the production engines wouldn’t guarantee the power – the production cars used Chrysler 5.6-litre V8s and had grown considerably from the original concept, with new styling.
The Monica contract plus selling a few 3-L V8s tided Ted Martin over until John Pearce paid him what he was owed after receiving the insurance money. Pearce also used to sell second-hand racing tyres, bought from Gordon Spice amongst others.
I remember rushing up to the track after school and saw the smouldering remains of the jack pearce cars and transporter parked in an isolated spot – possibly at the top of the club circuit straight-my mate helped himself to a few spanners.I could write a book about life next to a race track as a Silson (silverstone) schoolboy.Phil.